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Nan Goldin is ready for Oscar night
NEW YORK, NY.- In the late 1970s, photographer Nan Goldin began documenting hedonism and bohemia in New York City, chronicling the downtown lives of her friends and lovers with raw intimacy. Those images became a time capsule of a grittier city and established Goldins place as one of Americas most important photographers. On Sunday, she is heading to the Oscars, where shell be surrounded by red carpet crowds and flashing camera lights. Goldin, 69, is the subject of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a film directed by Laura Poitras that has been nominated for best documentary feature. It follows Goldins efforts to raise awareness about the opioid crisis and her mission to remove the name of the wealthy and philanthropic Sackler family, who owned the pharmaceutical company that developed OxyContin, from the walls ... More

Michael Tilson Thomas revels in the present with the New York Phil
NEW YORK, NY.- The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has always been a performer who communicates joy when sharing the music he loves. On Thursday, there was also a deep sense of gratitude: Speaking from the stage, he called his appearance with the New York Philharmonic a lovely, affirming surprise. Although he made no direct mention of his health, many in the audience understood the context: In the summer of 2021, Thomas, 78, learned that he had glioblastoma, an aggressive and terminal form of brain cancer. For him, every performance now is an opportunity to revel in the present. There are only two works on this program, both of them discursive and ruminative: Thomass Meditations on Rilke, which had its premiere in San Francisco in 2020, and Schuberts Great Symphony. Thomas has always been a raconteur, and on Thursday ... More

Review: In 'Misty,' a restless artist grapples with a gentrifying city
NEW YORK, NY.- There are many ways to tell a story. Freestyle, direct address and a varied assortment of orange balloons are just a few of the expressive means deployed in Misty, which opened on Thursday at the Shed. This multidisciplinary piece, by the British writer and performer ArinzÃ© Kene, uses an array of sights and sounds to toy with the perceptions of the people it presumes are watching. The onstage musicians, Liam Godwin (keys) and Nadine Lee (drums), criticize Kenes opening rhymes, about a Black man who beats up a drunk passenger on the night bus. Will this be another play about, as Lee says, a generic angry young Black man? A story that meets the expectations of a mostly white audience and transforms Black trauma into a commodity? Maybe so, but its also a probing and restless self-portrait of the artist. In the show that Kene ... More

A Tolstoy Adaptation Has New Relevance
MUNICH.- Sergei Prokofiev died the same day as Josef Stalin: March 5, 1953. Its a coincidence youre more likely to come across in the composers biography than in Stalins. Because while Prokofiev barely figures in Stalins life, his own was profoundly, inalterably changed by Soviet rule. Among the many documents of that is his War and Peace, a work contorted through forced revision into strident propaganda. Rarely performed, it opened this week on the anniversary of their deaths at the Bavarian State Opera here in a darkly urgent and sensitively executed new production haunted by the war in Ukraine. Prokofiev began to adapt Tolstoys novel an expansive portrait of Moscow society around Napoleons 1812 invasion of Russia, and a study in the scattered forces that shape history in the early years of World War II, as the capital ... More

Review: In this dance, even the nose scratches are choreographed
NEW YORK, NY.- Two men in lavender puffer vests and jean shorts strike a pose. Together, they scratch their noses. And then they go right back to the pose. This happens in the opening duet of Jordan Demetrius Lloyds Blackbare in the Basement, which had its debut at Danspace Project on Thursday. Lloyd is a young choreographer who made a splash last year staging a performance in a schoolyard near his home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Blackbare, his first evening-length commission, extends the impression of a distinct voice still developing. All three shows are sold out. That moment in the duet is indicative of the 50-minute works attention to detail and destabilizing use of form. The nose scratching is casual, seemingly a break in form, but since the two men do it in unison, the doubled gesture is as choreographed, ... More

For rare book librarians, it's gloves off. Seriously.
NEW YORK, NY.- Last month, The New York Times reported on an ultrarare medieval Hebrew Bible that was headed to auction with a record-smashing estimate of up to $50 million. The reaction was swift. Why are they handling this without cotton gloves? Shame on them, one reader wrote in the comments section, referring to photographs showing someone touching the worn pages. This photo is disturbing, wrote another. Why is this person touching such an old book with ungloved hands? The alarmed tweets and emails kept rolling in. At the same time, a silent scream of exasperation arose at rare book libraries around the world. People who handle rare books for a living are used to doing battle with a range of dastardly scourges, including red rot, beetles and thieves. But there is one foe that drives many of them particularly crazy: the general ... More

Suzy McKee Charnas, writer of feminist science fiction, dies at 83
NEW YORK, NY.- Suzy McKee Charnas, an award-winning feminist science fiction writer who in a four-novel series created a post-holocaust, male-dominated society called the Holdfast that is liberated by an army of women, died Jan. 2 at her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was 83. David Szanton, a cousin, said the cause was a heart attack. Her death was not widely reported at the time. Charnas, whose books were well regarded but who, by her account, did not make a living from her writing, was best known for her science fiction. But she also wrote vampire fiction, young adult fantasy novels with women as central characters, and a memoir about taking care of her father in his later years after a long period of estrangement. In an epic that began with Walk to the End of the World (1974) and concluded 25 years later with The ... More

Greig Burgoyne presents exhibition of newly commissioned work at The Lowry
SALFORD.- Presented as part of The Lowrys Edit Series the one who was standing apart from me is an exhibition of newly commissioned work by Scottish artist Greig Burgoyne, complemented and informed by several works on paper selected by the artist from the LS Lowry Collection. Burgoyne spent several visits over a period of six months exploring the collection, as well as the galleries themselves, when empty.  His focus was not on what we see, but what was absent and sensed. Based on self-imposed rules and processes, Burgoynes work embraces seemingly contradictory ideas, such as using drawing to visualise the invisible. Rather than a literal interpretation, Burgoyne considers the invisible as the broader absences all around us. In this exhibition, these absences are explored through a series of videos and performances, ... More

Wilding Cran Gallery presents a selection of new paintings by Robert Gunderman
LOS ANGELES, CA.- Wilding Cran Gallery is presenting Place Like You, a selection of new paintings by Robert Gunderman, inspired by the emotive relationships between organisms and the subjectivity of the natural world. Through an exploration of the microscopic and macrocosmic biomes of our universe, the exhibition of Place Like You grounds Robert Gundermans artistic practice in his native landscape of Southern California. Holding the belief that everything is connected on a molecular level, Gundermans oil paintings of landscapes, weather systems, flora, and fauna, embrace duality, bifurcation, and paradox in order to capture the infinity of relationships held within a moment of time. In an effort to depict intricate networks of cells through the lens of human experience and tenets of theoretical physics, Place Like You is deeply ... More

Spot, record producer who captured the fury of 1980s punk, dies at 71
NEW YORK, NY.- Glen Lockett, an influential record producer who, working under the name Spot, helped define the jet-turbine sound of American punk rock in the 1980s, recording groundbreaking albums by Black Flag, HÃ¼sker DÃ¼, Minutemen and many others, died on March 4 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He was 71. His death, in a nursing home, was announced in a Facebook post by Joe Carducci, a former co-owner of SST Records, the iconoclastic Hermosa Beach, California, label where Lockett made his name. Lockett had been hoping for a lung transplant in recent years after a long battle with pulmonary fibrosis, and he had spent most of the past three months in a hospital after a stroke. As in-house producer for SST from 1979-85, Lockett controlled the mixing board on landmark recordings that helped bring American punk from deafening gigs in garages ... More